Many portable data processing devices such as wireless personal digital assistants (“PDA”) and cellular telephones are capable of processing multimedia content including, for example, digital audio content, music instrument digital interface (“MIDI”) audio content (e.g., ring tones), still video images and even motion video. In addition, many Internet service providers today allow subscribers to download multimedia content and applications (e.g., games, utilities, messaging clients, etc) over the data processing device's wireless or terrestrial network connection.
One problem which exists with current systems, however, is that even through many current portable data processing devices are powerful enough to process the multimedia content and applications, the portable devices do not have sufficient non-volatile storage capacity to store a significant amount of multimedia content and/or applications. While current storage technologies such as Flash memory and hard discs have improved significantly in recent years, they are often still inadequate for storing, for example, a user's entire MP3 collection or collection of still pictures or video.